Along with emergence and popularization of the Internet, billions of Internet users are provided with various categories of literature data information over the Internet, and in the meantime, a category of network literatures carried over this emerging medium and targeted to the Internet users has come up potentially.
The network literatures refer to recently emerging literature contributions, literature-like texts, and network artworks including some literature components, all of which are presented and propagated over the Internet and embodied by means of hypertext links, multimedia presentation, etc. Particularly the original network contributions are predominant. The network literatures can be divided into three categories, where the first category relates to digital resources resulting from electronic scanning or manual entry of published literature contributions; the second category relates to literature contributions “published” directly over the Internet; and the third category relates to literature contributions created by computers or generated by related computer software onto the Internet, “relay novels” open over the Network and created jointly by several to tens of and even hundreds of Internet users, where the second category is predominant.
Along with development of the network literatures, numerous issues consequentially arise regarding copyright, literature creation contents, etc. Issues regarding how to browse latest contents of the network literatures conveniently, rapidly and centrally and how to retrieve or supervise the network literatures have not been effectively addressed so far due to the absence of a support for network literature related data.